It's a Gift

I mentioned at the beginning of the week when John Landis was TCM Guest Programmer that one of his selections was the W.C. Fields movie It's a Gift. So I watched it to do a full-length post on it here.

Fields plays Harold Bissonnette, a man with a family that drives him nuts at every turn. His daughter Mildred (Jean Rouverol) commandeers the bathroom and is worried that she'll never see her boyfriend John (Julian Madison) again if the family movies. His young son Norman (Tommy Bupp) is an obnoxious brat who constantly wears roller skates and when he takes them off, leaves them in a place where you know Dad is going to trip over them; you can see it coming a mile away. And then there's Harold's wife Amelia (Kathleen Howard), who henpecks Harold to no end, being as bad as Harcourt Fenton Mudd's wife in the two Star Trek episodes where Harry Mudd appears.

Harold dreams of getting away from the rat race and moviing the family out to California to buy an orange grove, and he's got his eye on a plot, too. He might just be able to get the money, since his uncle Bean is at death's door and that stands to leave an inheritance for Harold, not that the rest of his family want him to use it on an orange grove. Amelia points out that he can't even run the corner grocery store he owns; how is he going to run an orange grove?

Sure enough Bean dies and Harold buys the plot he's had his eyes on, except that there's one small problem. John works for the bank and has found out that that plot has been the subject of some false advertising in that it's not going to grow much of anything, except for weeds, not an orange to be found. But Harold has been so insitent on badgering the bankers into lending him the money that they do so anyway. What is Harold going to do when he finds out his farm isn't all it's cracked up to be?

To be honest, the plot of It's a Gift is even more threadbare than some of Fields' other movies, and serves more as a hook for Fields' set pieces and his brand of physical comedy. This time, however, unlike most of the reviews I've read, everything -- and I mean everything -- fell flat for me. Harold's son is such a jerk and so annoying you want Dad to smack him like what happened to Jane Withers at the end of Bright Eyes. Mrs. Bissonnette is no peach either and there would have been a more interesting movie if Harold just got up and fled to California, abandoning his family.

The various set pieces are equally obnoxious, particularly the one at the grocery store. There's a blind guy depicted as too stupid to use his cane properly, and a customer who wants ten pounds of kumquats, which is supposed to make us laugh because the word "kumquat" supposedly sounds funny. Except that this bit goes on and on and on and the customer is frankly mean instead of funny. The other big set piece is Fields trying to sleep on a porch swing and constantly being interrupted.

Everybody else seems to enjoy It's a Gift, so you will probably want to watch it for yourself to judge. And thankfully, the box set it's on is inexpensive, so even if you don't like this one it's not as if you're out a bunch of money.